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TALK: Dr. Lucy Powell: Imprisonment and the Eighteenth-Century Novel: The Enchanted Caste and the Hell Mouth

This Tuesday (24th), Lucy Powell, who is one of the BBC’s new generation thinkers is giving a talk at the Berrick Saul building called Enchanted Castle and the Hell Mouth – Imprisonment and the eighteenth-century novel.

This talk will explore the prevalence and function of imprisonment in the eighteenth-century English novel. Using some of the century’s most influential texts such as Defoe’s Moll Flanders, Fielding’s Amelia, and Goldsmith’s Vicar of Wakefield, it will demonstrate that incarceration speaks to the core concerns of the nascent novel genre: resistance and rebellion, and through these, to an emergent, era-defining individualism. It will illustrate that imprisonment in the novel functions as expression of captivity and as a means of personal liberation, and will situate its fictional findings in a wider, socio-cultural context of eighteenth-century prison reform, culminating, in the final decades, of the century, in the birth of the modern prison system, with the construction of the first penitentiaries.

Please do attend if you can make it.It should be a really informative, in-depth talk and I hope you’ll all be around at the beginning of term. The facebook event is below: